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Comment by quincyla | Hacker News Reader

Please delete this post. This is a private email I sent to the author. It was not intended to be shared on Twitter.

We just want to move on and focus on the future.

> We just want to move on and focus on the future.

Please understand, that it's not an issue with freeCodeCamp. It's an issue with Medium. And it would be a disservice to the entire community to remain silent. There must be thousands of people who are now on Medium because freeCodeCamp had chosen it as its platform, and they deserve to know what happened.

Genuinely curious though, why try to sweep under the rug the sketchy tactics Medium tried to pull here? I think this should be a good warning for others. You can move on, and focus on the future but still reflect and share the past. They are not exclusive, in my opinion.

my best guess (albeit, guess -- don't know much about medium or freeCodeCamp) would be fear of further frivolous threats and potential legal actions on behalf of medium. Frivolous lawsuits, no matter how ridiculous (libel, whatever) can feel a lot less frivolous to small/non-profit organizations who don't have the capital to point this out in court or respond when companies beat them over the head with their greater resource pools and influence. Also, it seems likely if they were bringing that much traffic to medium, they probably do have good relationships with some individuals at medium and probably don't want to alienate those connections based on a couple poor decisions, which is totally understandable.

I get you wrote something to a limited audience and didn't expect it to be shared beyond. But you really should consider any communication with a 'a few authors' as something that could possibly be shared with the whole world, even if you had said it was confidential, which wasn't even the case.

If you want this to blow over the best thing to do here is not say anything. The fact you are trying to 'silence' something that is clearly beyond the point of silencing looks bad in multiple ways (a bit naive, trying to control speech).

> It was not intended to be shared on Twitter.

That's not how the internet works.

Never send an email you wouldn't want forwarded. We all learn this lesson, eventually.

I can't find the person who originally said it, but: Dance like no one's watching, email like it might be read aloud at a deposition.

... It might be a bit late for that.

Yeah, it's already in the archive sites anyway

http://archive.is/3C1tK

Are you Quincy Larson?

I believe he is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15918172

The cat's out of the bag. I think you'll need to try a different approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com